


Preseason

by garden of succulents (staranise)



Series: better than you found them [3]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Gen, Mental Illness, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-02 11:47:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14544081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/pseuds/garden%20of%20succulents
Summary: On her third Saturday there, Andy woke up absolutely certain that moving back to Las Vegas was a mistake.Kent's over the moon about having somebody to come home to at the end of the day, but he's got to acknowledge that she's making some sacrifices to be with him.





	Preseason

On her third Saturday there, Andy woke up absolutely certain that moving back to Las Vegas was a mistake.

She eased out bed before dawn, careful not to wake Kent up, and took her meds with cold water on an empty stomach. Lathered her arms and legs with lotion, because Nevada turned her skin scaly and dry. Dressed in yesterday's office clothes and bought coffee and a smoothie from a yawning sixteen-year-old on the drive to the practice facility. Arrived _after_ there was already one minivan in the lot, a parent lifting his travel mug cheerfully to her as his son slept in the passenger seat. Unlocked the arena, clothing bag on her shoulder and hockey bag against her hip, and flipped on the lights, then disappeared into the coaching office to change into a tracksuit.

She drank the smoothie first, even though she felt groggy and robotic, and gave it fifteen minutes to settle her stomach before disturbing her gut with coffee. She should've taken an antacid along with her meds. She was fairly certain her hair in its headband looked stupid, but since her new haircut, she couldn't tie it back with a ponytail anymore.

She skated through it, because that's what you do.

The second week of practice was their first week on the ice all the time, without the slow grind of sorting out equipment and jerseys and teams. It was less chaotic, but rougher; the fact that she had no excuse made the roughness show up more. They came in waves; she ran three practices that day, a younger age group every time. The twelve-year-olds groaned and rolled their eyes at jokes the little kids liked (she'd been working on her schtick for the little kids) and the little kids spent about 25% of their time paying attention to hockey and 75% of their time goofing off. _None_ of them could shoot straight.

The kids were all disappointed that the Aces had done their morning skate at T-Mobile today and wouldn't be showing up at all. They all, every one, lined up on the stairs down from the office level to try to jump and hit the plane mobile at the end of practice, the way they'd seen the older kids try to do at the end of their own practice. Two of the Squirts fell and skinned palms or chins on the arena flooring while they did it. Andy second-guessed her decision to put equipment away after practice instead of monitoring the kids.

After the kids were gone she sat in her office and tried to write coaching notes, but the Pee Wee kids from 6am were already blurring together in her brain as she scribbled frantically. She decided she was done less because she'd gotten everything down than because her stomach was gnawing her spine, so she picked up lunch on her drive across town and slipped into the junior high school as a group of 4-Hers left and showered in the locker room before the rest of her roller derby team arrived for practice.

She wasn't coach or captain on this team, and she could tell that their coach and their captain _were_ trying, but even as she tried to focus on her game she could see that two old feuds were breaking forth to new mutiny, and it sounded like a major peacemaker had left the team for grad school. Practice was a miserable, disconnected mess, and they broke into different directions to grab fast food dinners before the meet. Andy heard one fractured angle of one and a half of the feuds and drank milk to try to settle her stomach.

 _I miss home,_ she thought, wadding up her sandwich wrapping and throwing it in the trash.

They won, but it didn't feel good.

Kent danced to her car in the underground parkade, where she'd parked and listened to the game wrapping up on the radio. It wasn't really surprising that the station had Kent on tape delay–he wasn't he most reliable provider of good quotes–so his excited praise of their defense's role in the win cut off from her speakers the moment he pulled the door open. He kissed her cheek, and the radio came back to life when she started up the car. Kent preened a little while the radio talked about how strong his preseason was, then dropped his phone into the dock for some music.

Traffic getting out of the arena was a little slow, so while they waited for a left turn Andy swallowed down reflux and said, "Can we go back to my place? I feel guilty about leaving Sydney alone again."

"Sure," he said, and slid his hand across the center console to take one of hers off the steering wheel. She tried to take comfort from it, the twining of their fingers and the press of his hand, but had to take her hand back to turn left. Kent didn't seem to mind; he reclined the seat a bit with a happy sigh.

"I loved having you _there,_ " he said as she drove. "It was just easier to do everything when I knew you'd pick me up afterward." He rolled his head over, smiling at her. She gave him quick glances in the streetlight, trying to keep her eyes on the road. "You make me happy."

She smiled for him, though there was a little wobble in her mouth when she did it, and because the road was straight enough she reached down to put a companionable hand on his leg to let him know not to take the smile personally.

There were a lot of bad ways to answer him when he asked, "So, how was your day?" There was _I want to move back to Minnesota._ That was a bad way. _I miss home_ was true, expressing fully to _her_ what she meant, but it might not sound that way to him. _What if I made a mistake coming here_ was so bad it would be disastrous. But she wanted _something_ big, something to point him like a compass, give him a handle on how to interpret all the details coming after about practices and teams and defense strategies.

"Not terrible," she said, noticing in the dark, as she paid attention to precise driving, that there was a burr in her throat. She cleared it. Traitorously, it closed towards the end of her sentence again. "But a little rough, you know?"

He reached up and touched her shoulder, kneading it a little. Andy winced. "Don't... do that," she said, wincing in a different way at having to say it. "It just makes the knots worse right now."

"Sorry," he murmured, rubbing circles over the spot.

"It's stupid and probably nothing. I'm just feeling all jittery and not okay and not..." Her mouth tightened as she pulled into her development, guided the car to her parking spot.

"You knew this was gonna be hard," Kent said, in the silence as the engine shut off. "Sounds like it is."

Andy squeezed her eyes shut, pressing down her automatic defenses. She'd said that to him more than once last year. From this angle it felt, objectively, like really shitty comfort. When she said it to Kent it carried so much respect for everything he was dealing with, the intensity of the challenges he took on in the world. When he said it to her it just make her feel how _not-okay_ she was, messy and not having any way to handle this.

It was difficult to force words out past the tears that threatened but she said, "I want it to _not be hard._ "

There was no answer to that, not in their conversations. It was what it was. Kent squeezed her shoulder, unbuckled his seatbelt. They got out and went into the house. He grabbed her clothing bag from the backseat, even when she made gestures tiredly indicating she would get it. 

He went right through to her washing machine, too, emptying the bag into a hamper while she greeted her cat. Sydney jumped onto the table where she set down her keys, and when Andy picked her up and pressed an ear to the calico's side, she could hear Sydney's silent purr rumbling through her. She stood there for a minute, swaying slightly with her cat, until Sydney decided she'd had enough.

Then Kent got a turn, wrapping her up in his arms while she leaned against his chest. She could feel how tired she was.

"I'm glad to be with you and I don't want to leave," she said to the silk pocket square at the front of his suit. "But right now I really resent this _entire_ process."

"I'm sorry I didn't make them trade me to the Wild," he said solemnly, which was such an outrageous move in hockey terms that there was never any question of him doing that, not even if she'd been his soulmate straight from Heaven, and she squeezed his chest and laughed a little. There were a lot of realities they couldn't change. 

He was hungry, and she supposed she hadn't eaten well, so she let him make a late dinner for them. She loaded dirty dishes into the dishwasher from the sink, then retreated to her kitchen table as he worked. It was easy to talk about meal plans, cooking, food, half-watching Kent as she teased the cat who sprawled on the table in front of her. 

It felt good to sit there, off her tired feet, and let him take care of her. She examined the feeling suspiciously; the usual complaint she heard about cis boyfriends was that they weren't attentive enough, and a few times for her friends an over-attentive boyfriend during the honeymoon period had degraded swiftly into abuse. She was wary of relaxing too soon. But on the other hand, this was Kent. Once after a loss in Minneapolis he'd still come to her apartment and helped her assemble an IKEA bookshelf before passing out on her bed. It made sense to her that he came out of games still with energy to burn, and he _did_ want to impress her and make her want to stay, but on the other hand... they were dating. She'd said she had a crappy day. She'd do the same for him.

Maybe he was being kind and meant to do a lot of that and that was just okay.

It wasn't high praise because the sauce and noodles both came from a pouch, but her standards were low, so when she dug into the pasta he made she still said, "This is good."

"Thanks," he said, and knocked his knee against hers. The hand that wasn't holding his fork was caressing the cat. Sydney wanted someone to put their hand on her exposed belly so she could rip it apart, but Kent rubbed the top of her head, the backs of her ears. He pulled back when she tried to whip her head and bite him, then stuffed his fork in his mouth long enough to lean over to the junk drawer and pull out a laser pointer. Sydney went delirious with joy.

When Andy stretched out facedown in bed later on, Kent leaned over her, hooking his chin on her shoulder. His weight felt good, even after the yoga he'd insisted they do together; her muscles always had a tightness these days. 

It took a little getting used to, how much Kent wanted to cuddle. She knew from their years of hooking up that sometimes his desire for sex was entirely trumped by his skin hunger. He didn't just want to pile together and mindlessly watch TV; he wanted to touch, to _be_ touched, in an intense and focused way, as though reminding his body that he could be comforted. But she'd kind of thought that was a symptom of scarcity, making up for months of drought with occasional binges. Not something he craved all the time.

It was a little hard to deal with, to be honest. Sometimes she just wasn't in the mood for that level of human interaction, for one thing, but also because... 

She used to be able to schedule her Kent time. They knew about it months ahead and mark it down on their calendars. She could keep up a brave face for a couple of hours or days. She could focus on him because he needed so much. But this long in Vegas, kind of like this long last summer before she went back to Minneapolis to pack up her things, he was starting to catch her when she was vulnerable and didn't have a really good front to put up for him.

He kissed her shoulder, brushing her hair away from her neck, and settled his forehead into the base of her skull. As she let his warmth soak into her, Andy found tears sliding out of her eyes and onto the pillow.

"I want this to be less hard," she whispered, wrapping her hand around his. "I don't want to feel like I'm... crawling out of my skin, doing everything wrong. The..." She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. Tried to think about it. They had literally, _three days ago,_ had a conversation about how she worried that she was annoying him, that he didn't want her there, that she was making his life worse. He'd refuted her on every point and logically she thought he was right. It wasn't truly useful to say the same thoughts still preyed on her. "The self-hatred's really strong lately."

Kent pressed a kiss to her neck. "If there's anything I can do," he whispered, "I'll do it."

The thing they both knew was that sometimes the only thing you could do with an awful mood was live through it. When you'd tried everything else in your quiver–the medication, and the therapy, and the reassurance, and the self-care, and all the love, and hope, and faith you had in you–sometimes you still had to wade through the shit to get to the other side.

Andy squeezed his hand. "Just keep doing what you're doing," she told him. "If... it lasts another week, I'll go back to my doctor."

Un-ease. Dis-ease. Her brain didn't like her to feel easy. This was what being crazy meant: You were lying in Kent Parson's arms as he murmured, "Love you," into your neck and fell asleep, and the temptation to crawl into a hole and die was still overwhelming.

 _Not today, motherfucker,_ she told her brain, and focused on falling asleep.

***

She woke up with the awareness that Kent had spooned her in her sleep, and then Sydney had walked on top of their bodies and flung herself down like a mat across their hips. Neither of them could move without disturbing her. Andy suspected she'd done it on purpose.

"I don't know if she realizes," she said, "that this means neither of us can get up and feed her."

"She's not gonna score very high on the math SAT," Kent agreed, and reached down to pet the cat and grope Andy's hip in an equal distribution of affection.

He had practice this morning; Andy worked out, then showered and got ready for church. She was determined not to make the mistakes of her first move to Las Vegas, or her subsequent move to Roseville. She needed a network of people, teammates and colleagues and friends; she was, to some degree, trying to transplant a fragile organism into a foreign environment, and had to pay attention to its ecological health. So even when she didn't like it, she stopped by peoples' offices on her way back from coffee, and ate dinner with the roller derby griefers, and went to a Unitarian Universalist church because it was the least offensive way to find people to stand around and drink coffee with afterward. 

It wasn't the same as having a strong network of friends and teammates like she had at home, but it was planting seeds for them. There was a time she'd stood awkwardly with the people who were her friends now, and been strangers to them. She was making an effort to be open to possibility.

Nobody at church knew she was dating Kent Parson yet, but several of them remembered her name. This week one middle-aged man remembered enough to seek her out and make feeble jokes about the Wild's loss in their first preseason game earlier in the week. She smiled and softballed it; he was a casual fan, not into discussing the intricacies of how the team was integrating its new talent. He seemed pleasantly surprised to hear that his own team had won last night.

When the mild Aces fan had ambled away the guest guitarist during the service came up behind her, holding a napkin with a couple two-bite brownies on it, and said, "Andrea, right? I'm Luis"

She turned around and blinked at him, revising her decision that she _didn't_ recognize him, shaking hands and mentally adding six inches of hair to his Facebook photo, and said, "Hi! You're... you know Kent, don't you?"

"Yeah," he said, with a slightly embarrassed grin. In a room full of people he didn't say, _Yes, I used to sleep with your boyfriend,_ but unless Andy severely missed her guess, that _was_ what they'd communicated through facial expressions and significant pauses. "That's me."

"Cool," she said, trying to sound normal but also welcoming. "Uh, nice to meet you."

"Yeah," he agreed, and took a bite of one of his brownies. "So uh, how're you liking Nevada?"

Andy weighed the possibility of coming up with a good lie against the possibility of telling the truth, and it was Kent's opinion of this man that made her experiment and say, "Uh, honestly, I'm still pretty miserable here." She paused, then added. "Kent's trying the best that he can. He's really great."

"But there's the whole rest of your life," Luis agreed sympathetically. "Do you know people here?"

"People have introduced themselves to me," she said, waving around the room. It was both a yes, and a no. _I've drunk coffee politely with strangers._

Luis considered for a minute, then said, "Janice is a hockey fan. She's on the sandwich committee–they meet Thursdays to make sandwiches for the homeless. Let me introduce you."

"That'd be great," she said, gesturing for him to lead the way. "I'd appreciate it."


End file.
